Facebook says it will begin test flights later this year for a solar-powered drone with a wingspan as big as a Boeing 737, in the next stage of its campaign to deliver Internet connectivity to remote parts of the world.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba will invest $1.0 billion in its cloud computing arm to expand its international presence, the company said Wednesday, as it looks outside its core business and beyond traditional markets.

Pakistani intelligence sought to tap worldwide Internet traffic via underwater cables that would have given the country a digital espionage capacity to rival the US, according to a report by Privacy International.

With the re-opening of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the US, the world is watching to see where in Cuba changes will be seen first. Many hope that it will be the country's 1990s-era internet access.

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standardized Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP). It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private and public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope that are linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections, and other technologies.

The Internet carries a vast array of information resources and services, most notably the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support electronic mail, in addition to popular services such as online chat, file transfer and file sharing, online gaming, and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) person-to-person communication via voice and video.

The origins of the Internet reach back to the 1960s when the United States funded research projects of its military agencies to build robust, fault-tolerant and distributed computer networks. This research and a period of civilian funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science Foundation spawned worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies and led to the commercialization of an international network in the mid 1990s, and resulted in the following popularization of countless applications in virtually every aspect of modern human life. By 2009, an estimated quarter of Earth's population uses the services of the Internet (see Growth).